$27.3 million verdict in asbestos case

Updated 4:48 pm, Thursday, June 6, 2013

An Alameda County woman's terminal cancer, more than half a century after she was exposed to asbestos in her husband's work clothes, has led to a $27.3 million jury verdict against the manufacturer of the insulation her husband installed.

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The suit was filed in May 2012, shortly after Rose-Marie Grigg, now 82, was diagnosed with terminal mesothelioma, said Steven Kazan, a lawyer for the Griggs. That form of cancer is commonly caused by exposure to asbestos fibers.

Grigg said her first husband, Donald Brown, installed insulation for a San Francisco subsidiary of Owens-Corning Corp. from 1950 to 1958. The insulation, Kaylo, had been designed by Owens-Illinois, which advertised the product as nontoxic and failed to disclose that it contained asbestos, Kazan said.

Because employees weren't told of the dangers, "they didn't change their clothes," the attorney said. "They didn't shower on the job."

According to Grigg's lawsuit, she would regularly shake out her husband's work clothes and then put them in the washer, gradually contaminating her laundry room with microscopic asbestos particles.

Kazan said mesothelioma, which afflicts the outer lining of the lungs and chest wall, is typically diagnosed several decades after asbestos exposure.

The couple then lived in Oakland and Castro Valley. They divorced in 1965, and Brown later died of causes unrelated to mesothelioma, Kazan said. He said the Griggs live in the Sacramento area.

The suit said Owens-Illinois had known since the 1930s that asbestos could be lethal and deliberately failed to warn its customers and their employees.

The company denied knowing that Kaylo posed any danger to household members like Rose-Marie Grigg.

"The risk of harm due to remote, derivative take-home exposure to asbestos was not even suspected, much less known, until years after Owens-Illinois ceased manufacturing asbestos-containing products in 1958," the company's lawyers said in a motion to dismiss the suit. They said the first published report of such a household illness was in 1965.

But Superior Court Judge Jo-Lynne Lee ruled in March that a jury should decide whether Owens-Illinois should have foreseen the harm its product caused. She said pre-1960 scientific research, cited by the Griggs' expert witnesses, had expressed concern about employees taking asbestos-laden clothing off the work site and recommended safety measures.

Eliot Jubilerer, a lawyer for Owens-Illinois, said Wednesday the company disagrees with many of the pretrial rulings and believes they skewed the verdict.

"The jury found many companies responsible for this injury," Jubilerer said. He said the company would ask the trial judge, Ioana Petrou, to reduce or overturn the damages, and would appeal if necessary.